Hundreds of flaws in our DNA

7th December 2012

A study conducted by a team at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge has suggested that everyone has on average 400 flaws in their DNA.

Most are “silent” mutations and do not affect health, although they can cause problems when passed to future generations, but others are linked to conditions such as cancer or heart disease, which appear in later life. The findings, from the 1,000 Genomes project to map normal human genetic differences, are published in The American Journal of Human Genetics.